Episode 3: The meaning of aloha ‘āina with Puanani Burgess

On the thin stretch of land between stark, sere cliffs and bright blue ocean Auntie Puanani Burgess sits in Wai‘anae’s Hale Na‘au Pono, talking about aloha ‘āina as the traffic passes by on Farrington Highway.

To understand aloha ‘āina, says Auntie Pua, one must first understand aloha. She takes the word apart letter by letter: a is akahai, to treat with kindness delivered with tenderness; l is lōkahi or unity and harmony; o is ‘olu‘olu, or pleasantness and sweetness; h is ha‘aha‘a or humility; and the final a, ahonui, is patience. All of these qualities, says Auntie Pua, must be brought to the relationship with land.

“I have friends who do understand how to speak the language of the ‘āina, who put their face down to the earth and like when we honi, I put my nose next to your skin and I breathe you in, they put their nose next to the land and breathe in the deep scent of that land. People I know who understand and practice aloha ‘āina, they understand it deeply and when they go to someone else’s land, they go with the humility knowing that I have to be able to smell this land and understand what she is teaching me.”

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When Dr. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln was a boy of eight living in the uplands of Kula, Maui he saved his money for several months and bought a number of rare Hawaiian plants to plant is his backyard. He was a little kid, proud and happy, but three weeks later the axis deer came through and ate every single plant but for one lone koai‘a tree. Lincoln, now an assistant professor in indigenous crops and cropping systems at UH Mānoa, tells the story as he reflects on the meaning of aloha ‘āina.

Davianna Pōmaika‘i McGregor is a professor at UH Mānoa and a long-time member of the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana, the group that in the 1970s successfully fought to stop the US military’s bombing of the island. Aloha ‘āina, she notes, is not a simple term; it conveys varying things depending on time and context.

The first navigators to reach these islands were led here by starlight. They sailed the waters of the world’s largest ocean with the sun and the moon, the wind and the rain as their companions and the heavens as their guide. They made landfall on the wide-open coastline of Ka‘ū on the southern tip of Hawai‘i Island, and then they moved out into the astonishing lands that would become their home. They found sister peaks, one of them, Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the world.

The first Polynesian navigators arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in canoes laden with plants that would become the foundation of the most complex and sophisticated agricultural systems in Oceania. These “canoe plants,” as they are known today, had been cultivated by the Polynesians for millennia and sustained their societies as they moved out across the Pacific. The navigators brought some twenty-five differing canoe plants to Hawai‘i. There was noni for medicine, kukui for light, kamani for wood.